The university in the modern capitalist society

Significant changes in the character of labor, in interrelation to the dynamic scientific and technical development determined by the laws of the modern capitalistic society, have undertaken the radical redefinition of the position and the role of higher education in the societies of the developed capitalist states.
Today scientific knowledge is a force of production. The achievements in research, after a short period of time, become industrial applications.
The relationship between scientific research and material production tends to transform to uniform constant procedure, where the needs of production lead to specific research programs, the results of which are almost immediately applied in production. Consecutively, the production and the application of scientific knowledge becomes a needed and necessary condition for the production of goods.
Given though the domination of the capitalist relations, the powerful bond between scientific research and productive procedure is now translated to an immediate subjugation of science to capital.
The university, for a long period of its history, was distant from the labour activities of society. As a privileged space of free arts and humanitarian studies, it served the reproduction of the ruling ideology, but, in parallel, it cultivated general mental abilities to the spawns of the social elites.
The industrial revolution began to orientate higher education to production and research. But the entanglement of the university in the scientific and technical progress remained for a long time quite unstable and indirect, while its role of training the workforce needed to offer specialized services (legal, medical, technical, tutoring, military, etc.) and also to crew a constantly growing bureaucratic management mechanism of production and society was more significant.
Today the tendency of direct coupling of knowledge production and goods production, in interrelation to the significant importance that scientific knowledge has acquired in the profitability of the enterprising activity, boosts the university to a permanent and systematic entanglement in scientific research, in close relationship with the places of practical application of its results.
Since scientific knowledge, as a productive force, becomes an important factor in the profitability of the modern capitalist economy, the permanently increasing subjugation of the university to the needs of production implies that the subjugation to the purposes and activities of the market will become more and more powerful. The operation of universities, as far as the orientation of scientific research and the use of its results is concerned, is henceforth determined by its usefulness to the needs of capital.
The university closely intermingles with the world of enterprises. Great multinationals are present in universities, like in Cambridge for example, where departments are founded and funded by: BP, Shell, Unilevel, Price Waterhouse, Marks and Spencer, Rolls Royce, AT&T, Microsoft, Zeneca. The programs of many universities are based on the needs and dictations of enterprises. Enterprise representatives participate in the management of academic institutes while presidents of universities and deans participate in the administration boards of the enterprises that are connected to them.
A specific trait of the modern universities is their professionalism and massiveness. Given that scientific knowledge is today a productive force, its acquisition consists a condition for constituting marketable professional qualifications of a constantly widening part of salaried toilers. Therefore, the interest for scientific knowledge and its satisfaction through higher education studies is directly connected with the mass objective of the future salaried toilers to successfully exist in an uncertain and highly competitive work market.
As institutes that provide scientific knowledge, universities become the place where a big part of the man-power is created. Their consecutive massiveness has raised their functional cost to a high level. An important problem of universities' adjustment to these new facts emerges here. Many of the attempted reforms in higher education come to face this problem.
Traditional university mainly addressed small elite and offered it a high level education equivalent to its social status. The massiveness of universities observed after the 2nd World War involves opening the higher education doors to wider social layers, including part of the working class. Today university cannot be but massive, given the afore mentioned participation of scientific knowledge to the constitution of merchantable working skills.
But to the capital and the bourgeois state is unthinkable that a big part of the future salaried toilers studies in the university, with the traditional educational specifications that use to concern the social elite. The traditional university’s wider knowledge, as familiarisation to the greatest achievements of civilization, the systematic and full-scale activity on specific scientific fields, the cultivation of research skills and creative thought are very significant elements for a descent human life, but also unnecessary expense, when being offered to the biggest part of salaried toilers which are destined to function as a simple mean to the fastest and biggest profitability of capital.
The mass university of modern times, as the university of the mass of salaried toilers, should ensure low cost of studies and program flexibility (has to ensure the equivalence of the provided knowledge and professional skills to the current-coincidental needs of corporate activity) so that the use of its graduates is advantageous to the capital.
Therefore, the division of Higher Education in three circles that was undertaken by the Bologna procedure leads to lower cost, smaller duration, fragmentary and downgraded undergraduate studies for the big mass of students which will acquire a limited scope of working skills, transferring the acquirement of overall and deeper knowledge and also the occupation with scientific research to the 2nd and 3rd circle of masters and PhD degrees respectively.
The so-called lifelong education programs are today a separate field of university operation. In conditions of rapid scorn of knowledge and specialties possessed by toilers, the constant adjustment to the unsettled work market is rendered an imperative need. Lifelong education, far from being a lifelong mental culture and development of people, becomes a “lifelong” distressed effort of toilers to guarantee, through additional studies, rapid training and re-education, greater possibility in staying longer in the work market.
The weight of the constitution and maintenance of merchantable working skills through university studies and lifelong education programs is more and more charged on the backs of the toilers who are called to purchase a big part of the academic services like purchasing any other merchandize.
What characterizes higher education today is the continuously greater integration of its operations in a market of education services, where various institutions participate with their “products” like private and public universities, private and public enterprises, organizations, chambers etc. This is the exact market of “education services” of higher education, as a field of profitable investment, which the planned recognition of the operation of non-public universities is trying to create in Greece as well.
In this procedure of surrendering universities to the forces of the market the bourgeois state is not a simple observer. By taking legal measures, by the proper use of university funding and, at the same time, by imposing valuation procedures to them, it operates as a powerful pressure mechanism for the faster and better response of universities to the needs and orders of the capitalist economy.
The valuation of universities is of particular significance because it consists a continuous efficiency control mechanism, with a respective punishment for the non-efficient institutes. The popular bubbling that the university valuation will supposedly contribute to the improvement of the quality of the educational work suppresses a particularly critical issue: that the quality of the higher education services is decisively determined by the quality represented in the working skills and specialties of the salaried toilers that are acquired in the universities for the needs of the capital. The work market is always the highest quality valuator of the universities, that's the demand expressed in the work market, on behalf of the capital, of man-power of particular specifications.
The universities' obligation, through valuation, to “open up to society” and to its professional needs, means no more than more effective adjustment to the needs and demands of the market, which, for the society which is dominated by capitalist relationships and adjusts in conformism to them, are spontaneously promoted as its own demand and need.
The undertaken participation of students and social institutions (professional chambers, enterprises unions, etc.) in the valuation of universities doesn’t imply the control of the quality of the work of the universities from the point of view of the authentic human needs, seen by the prism of emancipation and creative work. On the contrary, it implies the valuation of universities through the prism of the needs of alienated work, the needs of the capital and the subjugated to the capital people of salaried labour; for both knowledge and in general working skills are primarily significant, on one side as a means for the production and acquirement of maximum profit and on the other side for receiving a salary.
In a period where scientific knowledge acquires great importance for human labour and for everyday activities, where such possibilities of scientific education and multifaceted mental culture of people are presented for the first time, the mass interest on knowledge is presented as surrendered to objectives exquisitely alienated to human. In a society that wants to be called the “society of knowledge”, what is dominant isn’t the argument of the catholic education once expressed by Enlightenment but the mass phenomenon of semi education where “Semi education is the spirit which has been possessed by the fetish character of the merchandize”.
The absence of authentic interest for education is another view of the absence of authentic-creative prospects for the people in the field of social work.
So, if people's education, its content, its breadth, its form and rhythms don't serve them, their bents and authentic desires, it’s because their work itself as a privileged field of expressing their knowledge and their creative skills don’t serve them but the capital.
Consequently the protest against the strictly useful and alienated spirit that has trapped higher education cannot be reliable when it is limited to educational ideals, to drawing a model of an alternative university, away of practical activities like the models of Humboldt’s institute of free search for the truth in favour of the truth. Given the non-reversible character of the coupling between work and knowledge, the prospect of emancipation of knowledge and of the institutions that cure it by market’s and profit’s purposes cannot be anyone else but the liberation of labour from capital’s domination.
Modern university, as a space of training of a mass and constantly growing part of salaried toilers, is closely contracted to social work and because of this it internalises in a great degree the class contradictions and intensities which characterize it. So the claim of an alternative university, of alternative higher education in the service of the toilers and not of the capital can only be founded on the promotion of another society where people’s work, as a cooperative scientific activity of designing and managing of the collective productive forces, will serve the free development of each as a condition for the free development of all.

A. Renaut, The revolutions of Universities, pub. Gutenberg, Athens 2002, pg 28
S. D. Mauroudeas, The three seasons of the University, pub. Ellinika Grammata, Athens 2005, pg 111-115, 117, 121-123
In most of OECD countries “the number of young people that acquire their first degree of higher education every year reaches the number of young people that graduated in 1950 from secondary education.” G. Tsamasfyros, The University in the 21st century, in: D. Basantis, University in the 21st century, publ. Papazisis, Athens 2000, pg 16
Th. Adorno, Theory of semi education, publ. Alexandria, Athens 2000, pg 57